Demolition ordered for Rosemeadow estate

By Dylan Welch Police Reporter

AN URBAN design experiment declared a failure 10 years ago, and inadequate funding to help young people in western Sydney, contributed to this week's street violence in a Rosemeadow estate.

The Government revealed yesterday it would demolish part of the troubled estate as police continued to deal with the fallout from Monday's brawl, which left two people with bullet wounds and several others stabbed and bashed.

A 16-year-old who was stabbed several times during the fight was transferred from hospital to Campbelltown police station. He was charged with two counts of discharging a firearm with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, and two counts of affray.

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A police source said the teenager had provided a "chilling" interview in which he described practising firing a rifle into a field behind his house, and expressed no remorse about the two people he was accused of shooting.

Another teenager who was treated for stab wounds as a result of the brawl was charged with two counts of affray.

A third, Anthony Michael Neely, 18, faced Campbelltown Local Court yesterday charged with affray. A 26-year-old man has also been charged with affray and refused bail.

But the clean-up - which included the riot squad escorting a truck down Macbeth Way yesterday to gather rocks and bottles that could be used in a riot - does little to tackle the problems the suburb faces.

While the high unemployment, low income and large numbers of children are a problem, perhaps the single most pressing issue is the disaster created in the 1970s when the state government implemented the American Radburn design for public housing.

"Everything that could go wrong in a society went wrong," the Sydney architect who introduced the design to the state, Phillip Cox, said in 1998 of an estate in Villawood.

"It became the centre of drugs, it became the centre of violence and, eventually, the police refused to go into it. It was hell."

The design flips houses around, with the backyards facing the street and the fronts facing each other over common yards. But the laneways used as common entries and exits to the houses helped ghettoise communities and encourage crime.

The Government has begun to demolish some of the Radburn estates. A spokeswoman for the Housing Minister, David Borger, said a $3.7 million plan would "de-Radburn" all 88 townhouses in Rosemeadow's Three M estate. Work would start in early March and was expected to finish in April, she said. Five of the townhouses would be demolished.

The minister warned yesterday that anyone involved in the brawl may face eviction for breaching their tenancy conditions.

But housing is not the only problem. South of Campbelltown there are five suburbs - Rosemeadow, Ambarvale, St Helens Park, Glen Alpine and Engloire Park - that are home to more than 7000 people aged 19 and under.

The young people have access to one youth worker, Bill Clarke, who told the Herald he has about $3500 a year to run projects after salaries and other expenses.

"We get about $68,000 a year, that's it, that includes wages, everything," said Mr Clarke, who runs Ambarvale Youth Centre. "We're left with about 5 per cent of our funding to run programs."